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The Marion Superior Court has ordered the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office to return money it seized earlier this year at the Indianapolis FedEx Hub to a California-based family jewelry business.
In April, business owners Henry and Minh Cheng had a customer send them $42,825 cash as payment to their small wholesale jewelry business.
That parcel never arrived because Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers seized it.
“Indiana had no basis to forfeit the Chengs’ money, and so it’s only right that the government has agreed to return it,” Institute for Justice Attorney Marie Miller said in a news release. “But many other people are affected by the state’s practices of taking money simply because it goes through Indiana and failing to identify a crime that would justify the forfeiture. The counterclaims aim to end this abuse of civil forfeiture not just for Henry and Minh, but for everyone.”
The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office stated it did not have a comment at this time.
Marion Superior Court Magistrate Judge Anne Flannelly ordered the money be returned by check earlier this month to Henry’s attorney, Aaron Williamson, with Kroger Gardis & Regas.
Williamson did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The Chengs started their wholesale jewelry business about 30 years ago.
They travel across the country serving retail shops. The couple resides in California and has never been to the Hoosier State.
The Virginia retailer shipped the money using FedEx, and the parcel was routed through the Indianapolis FedEx hub, the second largest FedEx hub in the U.S.
There, a police officer seized the package and presented it to a K-9.
The dog alerted, allowing the police to get a warrant to open the parcel.
After an officer found the cash in the parcel, the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office filed a civil-forfeiture action to keep the money.
As with other civil-forfeiture cases originating from the FedEx facility, the prosecutors alleged that the cash was proceeds of “a violation of a criminal statute.”
“I’m ecstatic at the prospect of getting my money back,” Henry Cheng said in a news release. “and this is just the beginning. What happened to my company shouldn’t happen to anyone. Indiana should stop trying to steal from law-abiding citizens by seizing property and figuring out later whether there’s any basis for keeping it.”
Since 2022, Indiana has begun proceedings to forfeit more than $2.5 million from in-transit parcels, and the state has raked in approximately $1 million from those parcels.
The Institute for Justice filed the Chengs’ response in August, along with counterclaims alleging the civil-forfeiture action was a part of an on-going scheme that violated their rights and those of classes of people in similar situations.
Those individual and putative-class counterclaims will continue, according to the Institute for Justice.
According to MyCase, the hearing on motion for summary judgment was cancelled. There are no hearings scheduled in the case at this time.
The case is State of Indiana v. Patrick H., Henry Minh, 49D04-2405-MI-020041.
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